I
The concept of the self stands as one of the chief puzzles of contemporary philosophy. Our selfhood presents itself to us as something at once utterly familiar and wholly mysterious. What (we might think) could be better known to us than our own self, ever there, whatever we think or sense or feel? And yet, as we try to fix ourselves in our own gaze, such confidence evaporates and we realise that we can scarcely put our finger on who or what we really are. However, it is not simply as an isolated mystery that contemporary philosophy accords the most vital importance to the notion of the self, for it may be considered a conceptual lynchpin of the entire discipline in the sense that there is scarcely a region of philosophical speculation where it does not play an absolutely central role in our understanding. For example, the egocentric perspective, which holds that all knowledge originates in those perceptions, thoughts and feelings which we personally experience, is a scarcely avoidable starting point for epistemology, although it is one whose significance lies not merely in those matters to which it lays claim, but equally in those that it places in question, such as the existence of the external world or of other minds. Contemporary science has only added to these puzzles, as developments in the fields of neurophysiology, evolutionary biology and social psychology have thrown up new and challenging perspectives for understanding selfhood. But the philosophical significance of the concept of selfhood is not confined to theoretical philosophy, of course; it also spreads deeply into the axiological realm. Not only must the ethicist face foundational issues, such as the possibility of free will and the criteria of personal identity, but, as Kant well saw, any practical philosophy which takes as its starting point the rationally acting self thereby sets for itself a cardinal locus of value—that of the free rational agent whose existence alone has, or confers, intrinsic worth. And this point in its turn must raise for us the principal problem of all moral and political philosophy; namely, whether, why and how such selves should concern themselves with the well-being of other such selves.
For all of these reasons selfhood is a vital topic in contemporary philosophy. But, of course, the interest is not a novel one, and a deep concern with the notion of selfhood might well be thought the hallmark of all philosophy in the modern period, as will be familiar to readers from the study of such figures as Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant. However, the history of philosophy as taught today is a highly selective activity. In its determination to tell a particular story, it passes over in silence large swathes of otherwise interesting philosophical work. This is true of nineteenth-century British philosophy as a whole, and especially so of the philosophical movement that developed in the last quarter of that century and which is known today as British Idealism. Marked by its high moral and religious tone, grounded in a bold spirit of metaphysical construction, and deeply influenced by the philosophies of Hegel and Kant, from the 1870s onwards there sprung up in Britain and rose rapidly to dominance a new spirit in philosophy quite unlike either the empiricist or common-sense systems which had hitherto dominated. While it was never characterised by anything like a single dogmatic creed, its various champions—who included such figures as T.H. Green (1836–1882), Edward Caird (1835–1908), F.H. Bradley (1846–1924), Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923), Henry Jones (1852–1922), D.G. Ritchie (1853–1903), R.B. Haldane (1856–1928), J.M.E. McTaggart (1866–1925) and R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943)—held views which were clearly cut from the same cloth. Their ideas supported and expanded each other’s, and even where they differed (as inevitably they sometimes did) this was from within a common understanding of the history, nature and purpose of philosophy. Although it continued as a discernible strand of philosophy well into the twentieth century, the ascendancy of British Idealism lasted only until about 1900, at which point more realist and empiricist forms of philosophy forcefully reasserted themselves, in no small part by painting Idealism in rather cruder and darker colours than it ever deserved, leaving it under a cloud from which it has never fully recovered. Recent years have seen a renewed interest in this forgotten and disparaged tradition, however, and the essays of this volume continue that ongoing work of recovery and re-evaluation. 1
One of the most striking differences between modern analytic philosophy and British Idealism is that while philosophers of the former persuasion tend to adopt a narrow focus, working in close detail on specific isolated problems, those of the latter tradition preferred a broader perspective, maintaining not simply that philosophical results in one field had implications in other domains, but even more fundamentally that the Idealist principles they uncovered were at work everywhere, creating a grand narrative or synthesis. Idealism to them was a single highly integrated world-view, a unitary vision of the nexus binding together mind, world and God, whose implications spread out across the whole of philosophy, from logic and metaphysics through to ethics and aesthetics. One difficulty with understanding such a highly integrated system of thought is that of finding a ‘way in’. The language of Idealism can all too easily seem like a closed circle, where everything connects to everything else but nothing connects to anything familiar. It is the contention of this volume that the idea of ‘selfhood’ provides just such a key for unlocking the thought of the British Idealists. Standing at the centre of their world-view, the concept of the self is an axial and common point that radiates throughout all of the rest of their thinking, both illuminating their distinct researches and knitting them all together.
There is no escaping the centrality of metaphysics in British Idealist philosophy. Today, to describe some question as ‘metaphysical’ is a way of indicating its obscure and marginal status with respect to inquiry, but for the Idealists, questions about the fundamental nature of reality push themselves forward into all debates. Since they understand being ‘fundamental’ precisely in contrast to the everyday, British Idealist metaphysics is typically a dialectic of appearance and reality. Reflection upon the notion of selfhood can take us right to the heart of that dialectic. At root, in so far as the philosophy is idealistic, selfhood constitutes the model for reality itself. The precise relationship between experience and the subject of experience is no doubt a complex and subtle one, to be sure, but at its most fundamental, the idealistic claim that all reality lies within experience is just the thesis that so-called ‘external reality’ is, in truth, no more distinct from its cognition than are our thoughts from our thinking of them. Notwithstanding appearances to the contrary, knowledge of the world is really a kind of self-knowledge, and there can be no explanation of what it means to grasp the former except though an account of our knowledge of the latter.
To take just three examples, we can see this in Ferrier, for whom no object is ever given except along with a subject; we can see it in T.H. Green, for whom the relational structure of the known world designates it the ‘work of the mind’; and we can see it in F.H. Bradley, for whom it is simply impossible to abstract out the element of our experiencing them from the things which we experience. But matters are not quite as simple as the foregoing might suggest, for if selfhood constitutes the model for fundamental reality itself, it must be conceded that the self in its deeper being is not to be mistaken for the self as it presents itself in its everyday or common-sense dress. Experience is foundational, but appearances can be misleading. The self of the British Idealists is certainly not to be construed naturalistically—and this much we might expect from their idealistic stance—but more puzzling assertions may also be found. For example, many Idealists argue that the individual self is not properly distinct from other selves (although there are differences of opinion as to whether this is because it is merely a moment or aspect of mind more generally, or because it is something that only comes into being through interaction with other selves.) And perhaps equally strange, many Idealists argue that the self is not properly temporal. (And here again we find differences. For some this is because it is something essentially timeless which merely appears or manifests itself in time, while for others this is because its proper form of being is as a moral ideal that ought to exist rather than as any sort of temporal actuality.)
One of the most characteristic features of British Idealism is its focus on philosophy of religion. In no small part in response to the difficulties which originated from contemporary science and biblical scholarship (the so-called ‘Victorian crisis of faith’), it very largely abandons the traditional conception of God as ontologically distinct from the world, replacing it with a God that is immanent in nature, and most especially immanent in the finite self; a position whose reverse expression, of course, is to say that the finite self is implicitly infinite or divine. Our true self—the self which lies behind the individual we ordinarily take ourselves to be—is continuous with the divine principle. A good example here is T.H. Green, for whom the progressive growth of human knowledge is precisely the progressive unfolding of the infinite and eternal understanding, while moral and social progress is understood as nothing less than the realisation of God on earth. We see the same ideas, this time in a more personal guise, in A.C. Bradley (F.H. Bradley’s younger brother), who declares that ‘the stirring of religion is the feeling that my only true self in the end is God, to be a pulse-beat of his infinite life, to feel and know that I am that and nothing but that, and that this horrible core of selfishness in my heart, that parts me from him, is not there in his eyes at all, but melts like ice before the sun when I give myself utterly up to him’. 2 The root inspiration behind this theological conception is to be found, of course, in Hegel’s doctrine of the true infinite, that interpenetration of finite in the infinite and the infinite in the finite, which, like the Idealists who followed him, he construes as the breaking down of the separation between God and Man. 3
The doctrine of the true infinite is absolutely central to Hegel’s logic, but it might seem that, with logic, we enter into a region where the notion of selfhood can be of but little guidance to us. Yet even here it may be argued that the concept offers a vital key to understanding the Idealists’ contributions. 4 The earliest examples of British Idealistic logic are concerned with rejecting the extreme psychologism of empiricists such as Mill and Spencer, arguing robustly that logic deals with more than just the empirically established laws of psychological association. But it would be quite mistaken to thereby suppose that the Idealists see logic as a wholly abstract or ‘pure’ science, one that deals only with meanings and propositions without any reference at all to the way in which they occur in psychical life. Idealist logic is concerned rather with what is necessary and universal in so far as it is expressed in what is concrete and particular, the real as it is expressed in ideal form, that is through the mental life of the actual subject. ‘Truth’, argues Bosanquet, ‘is reality as it makes itself known through particular minds in the form of ideas’, ‘not merely an antecedent framework, but a spirit and a function’. 5 The unity-in-diversity of conscious self-awareness is precisely the clue that must be followed in order to grasp the underlying logic of reality itself.
Some of the most striking and well-known ways in which the British Idealists appeal to the notion of selfhood come into view as we shift the focus of our attention from theoretical philosophy to...